The Spectre-Smitten

Excerpt

Few topics of medical literature have occasioned more wide and contradictory speculation than that of insanity, with reference, as well to its predisposing and immediate causes, as to its best method of treatment. Since experience is the only substratum of real knowledge, the surest way of arriving at those principles which may regulate our researches, especially concerning the subtle disorder mania, is, when one does meet with some well-marked case, to watch it closely throughout, and be particularly anxious to seize on all those more transient indications, which are truer characteristics of the complaint than perhaps any other. With this object did I pay close attention to the very singular case detailed in the following narrative. The apparent eccentricity of the title will be found accounted for in the course of the narrative.